Abstract/Summary

This research is an examination of the relationship between scenography and audiences through selected contemporary performances of Samuel Beckett’s texts (both prose and drama) that have been staged primarily in Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Great Britain since 2008. These case studies have been selected as they allow a timely exploration of design and audience experience within the context of contemporary theatre experimentation and adaptation that has occurred since the turn of the millennium. This research focuses on how contemporary adaptations and remediations guide the audience’s embodied responses, with specific consideration of the ways in which scenography engages the attention of audiences – through the arrangement and transformation of space, through the selection and manipulation of images, and through the action of the scenographic materials themselves which are often indirect and oblique; evoking an experience or a spectrum of potentialities rather than a singular message (McKinney and Palmer 2017: 11). The central research question for this project asks: how do the visual-aural-spatial elements of the mis-en-scène of a Beckett text, whether a play or the adaptation of a prose text, shape the response of the audience, acting as either a guiding element to a performance or its primary meaning? The purpose of this research is to try to understand scenography not simply as an embellishment to a performance but as a mode of encounter and exchange founded on spatial and material relations between bodies, objects, and environments. To achieve this, the research includes a thorough investigation of the design of each performance through an audience experience perspective. Rather than making assumptions about the audience’s experience of the theatre, this research engages with audiences to gather information on their theatrical experiences; this is achieved through an array of materials such as interviews with practitioners and designers, reviews, personal experience, and audience questionnaires.